The floodwaters had been coming for months, inching up the mud-earth defenses that stood between Bentiu’s marooned and famished inhabitants and the unending water beyond.
Four years of floods, caused by climate change, have overwhelmed two-thirds of South Sudan, but nowhere more severely than Bentiu, a northern city surrounded by water.
Hundreds of thousands of people are imprisoned under the flood level, only protected by earthen dykes that must be examined and strengthened on a regular basis to avert a catastrophic breach.
The highways leading out of Bentiu are flooded, including the lifeline to Sudan, which used to provide the capital of Unity state with the majority of its food. Supplies must now be ferried across the floodplain in canoes for many days.
“It’s effectively become an island,” said William Nall, the World Food Programme’s (WFP) director of research, evaluation, and monitoring, who rations out whatever grains, vegetable oil, and peanut paste make it through the reed-choked canals.
“There is no record of Bentiu being inundated in this manner… This is a one-of-a-kind situation.” ‘They will perish.’
The massive issue is symptomatic of a larger calamity afflicting South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation and one of the most susceptible to climate change.
Since 2019, one million people have been impacted by year-on-year floods that have swamped an area bigger than Denmark in a cycle of intense flooding.
Millions of animals have died, and 10% of the country’s arable land has turned to marsh at a time when 7.7 million people are hungry.
Record-breaking rains in upstream nations drove massive amounts of water into the White Nile, which spilled over the plains downstream in a slow-moving calamity.
Large areas of land got waterlogged, preventing water from draining away. Even throughout the dry season, the levels remained high, resulting in “permanent wetlands” in locations like Bentiu.
According to experts, the water in some parts may not recede for years, if not decades.
Far from being a one-time occurrence, the floods indicate a more permanent shift for subsistence farmers and cattle herders who are migrating to cities, completely unprepared for what is to come.
“They don’t know how to live,” community leader John Both Wang told AFP as ladies from his flooded hamlet waited for food supplies near Bentiu’s rapidly spreading shantytown.
In January, at the height of the dry season, satellite images revealed that the flood-affected region had increased by 3,000 square kilometers (1,160 square miles) in a single week.
“Every day, people migrate. Your home may be dry now, but it will be submerged tomorrow “Duop Yian, who grew up near Bentiu and now works for the Danish Refugee Council, a humanitarian organization, agreed.
They come with little and join a vast population in desperate need, including over 100,000 refugees from the country’s civil war, which lasted from 2013 to 2018. Kuyar Teny trekked through rivers with her hungry 18-month-old grandson to reach Bentiu.
“He was often hungry and wailing in the morning, but we didn’t have any food,” she told AFP as she waited to see a doctor. Malnutrition has rendered the boy’s hair straw-colored.
When AFP visited a health center servicing 20,000 people, it had just 10 employees. Three ladies on intravenous drips shared a single bed inside one tent.
In the embattled city, humanitarian organizations, not the government, are providing services. The situation is dismal beyond the sandbags and levees.
Yian represented a location under the surface where farmers previously tilled soil and children attended school. Nothing left save the tips of thatched cottages and clumps of water lilies – the final refuge for the very hungry, he said.
Tong was formerly home to thousands of people, but now just a few hundred dwell on a smattering of islands one hour by canoe from Bentiu.
Magok Bangany, an 80-year-old farmer who was born and reared in the area, is one of them. He recalled a big flood in the distant past, when he was around the age of manhood.
“It lasted two years before dissipating. This is by far the worst I’ve seen “As mud sucked at his feet, he said with a cane.
Seasonal flooding is common in South Sudan. Yet, according to Nall, nothing of this size has been witnessed since record-keeping started.
“We’re all in unfamiliar terrain here. This is much more significant than the most previous incident of its kind.”
These pressures may be felt even in areas that were spared the brunt of the flood.
Cattle herders in the country’s breadbasket area have struggled over land and resources due to a lack of grass, according to the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan, according to the think tank, “exemplifies the compounded, climate-driven kinds of instability and bloodshed” that Africa may suffer if wealthier nations do not provide funds to adapt to global warming.
Yet, contributions have been scant. The Ukrainian conflict has depleted assistance funding and risen food costs, forcing WFP to decrease rations even in hard-hit Bentiu.
Families that have depleted their monthly allowance eat whatever wild flowers and fruits they can find. “We have been forgotten,” Mary Nyaruay of Tong remarked. “In order to exist, we must strive.”
